Monday, August 24, 2009

For those of you who prefer using cube ice machines for your shaved ice or snow cone business…you’re not off the hook on maintaining the proper temperature for your ice! However, the rules for you are very different from those listed in the last post.

For shaved ice and snow cone machines that use cube ice, tempering is not necessary. We suggest just the opposite—drop the temperature of your ice storage freezer to around 5 to 10 degrees. You can do this by placing the cube ice in an ordinary chest freezer overnight. We have found that the harder the cube ice, the fluffier the snow produced by the ice shaver. This also works with snow cone machines as well.

If the cube ice gets too warm or watery, or as we call it “wet”, the ice shaver will produce very clumpy or crunchy snow. For example, the outdoor ice merchandiser that you see outside of your local convenience store often keep the bags of cube ice around 15 to 20 degrees, just cold enough to keep it from melting. If you take that ice directly from the store merchandiser and shave it you will get a fairly good cup of shaved ice. Instead of taking it directly from the ice merchandiser, drop it in a freezer overnight to allow the cube ice to get colder and harden a bit. Now when you shave the harder, colder ice, the ice will be fluffier than it was if taken directly from the merchandiser. One word of caution, if you get the ice too cold, the ice will be so fluffy that it will melt once syrup is added to it. If you find this is happening, simply increase the temperature in your chest freezer.